Monday, February 9, 2015

Highly amused by something I read (note: the following post far exceeds the healthy daily dose of snark -- you have been warned).

The Grumpy is upset that people don't have a strong incentive to repeatedly run dungeons once they start raiding or doing LFR:

So it got me to thinking about what would make dungeon more relevant for a longer period of time.

....

My idea would be this. Dungeon gear that drops will be 630 basic and as
you kill raid bosses it can go up. Not like missions to the "next"
level but to that level. Like lets say you killed 15 highmaul bosses in
LFR, when you do dungeons the gear that drops will be 645. If you kill
15 highmaul bosses on normal it would drop 655, heroic, 670, and so on.

....

The other problem might be that people would, or could, gear up too
quickly that way. Once you down 15 bosses at a specific raid level just
spam dungeons until you have all gear of that level. I can see that
point and I believe I have a solution for that as well. Instead of the
gear they "drop" being equal to your current raid level, have a bag at
the end of the run for everyone, a bag they can only get once per day
and that bag would contain 1 piece of gear, guaranteed, for your current
raiding level. So the dungeon would still drop 630 gear otherwise, but
once a day you have a chance to get something that very possibly could
be an upgrade.

I know I would still do it that way.

I left a comment responding to that last line in particular:

Yeah, everyone would. In fact, every raider would kill 15 bosses on
heroic the first day or two of content and then do a heroic dungeon
every day.

Why do you think forcing Mythic/Heroic raiders to do a
heroic dungeon every day is a good thing? They're already likely
spending 8+ hours a week working through the raid zone. You think
that'll make them happier or be constructive for the game somehow?

His response?

I don't think it matters what they
think, it is not for them, it is for the other 99% of the player base.
You can't design the game around the few. So do I think mythic raiders
would be happy about it? Don't know, don't care.

They would be no more "forced" to do it as a mythic raider as I am forced to change servers if I want to raid mythic.

I
choose not to, they can choose not to. Choice, it is a wonderful
thing. Something blizzard does not have right now. This would offer
it.

Bottom line is blizzard can do something to make dungeons
more relevant past the first week of the expansion and this is the only
idea I can personally think of that could breathe life into it.

If
you have any other ideas I would love to hear them. But reward needs
to matter and once raids come out I can't see any other reward they
could offer.

So let's break this down.First, his original idea: can you imagine killing 15 bosses in Heroic Highmaul and then having every single heroic dungeon boss dropping 670 gear? Thankfully, Grumpy managed to realize this *might* be a tad problematic and thus came up with a major improvement to his suggestion -- now you can "only" get one guaranteed 670 piece per day from a random dungeon.Let's do some math...you basically get 0.2 items per boss you kill, on average, in the best case scenario. So during Highmaul, that means you should expect to pick up 1.4 items per week from clearing it on heroic. On *top* of that, you should also get seven additional guaranteed items from running a heroic dungeon! Let's see...that's a 500% increase in gearing rate by doing heroic dungeons. Or, in other words, 83% of your gear would come from heroic dungeons.Now, to be fair, that's not counting the 3 coins per week (another 0.6 items) or the possibly of killing a mythic boss or two...let's say 2 mythic bosses for 0.4 items for 2.4 items per week counting 7/7H, 2/7M, and three coins spent. That's still a 291% increase in gearing rate from Grumpy's idea. Or 74% of your gear coming from heroic dungeons.Yeah. That's probably not a good idea. Not even remotely. Facerolling dungeons tuned for 610 ilvl with an ilvl of 650-660 to get nearly 75% of your gear? Just...no. I hope I don't have to explain why that's such a bad idea (and that's not even getting into the issue of how you could stop even doing heroic raids and still get 7 heroic raid drops per week).To put things in perspective, the garrison mission gives one raid drop every 14 days (and yes, it's technically a tier higher (unless you're a mythic raider already)).Second, screw those mythic raiders. Or, quite frankly, any heroic or mythic raider (I guarantee you 90%+ of heroic raiders would be doing that daily heroic for a guaranteed 670 item). We can't design parts of the game around them. Along those lines, let's also change the following:

No more weekly raid lockouts. 99% (note: heroic and mythic raiders make up more like 10% of the playerbase but we'll go with his number) of players won't run raids like crazy anyway.

No more limited stacking of consumables. 99% of players won't bother having 20 potions and elixirs active.

No more being limited to three seals per week. 99% of players won't bother getting more than three or so anyway because it keeps getting more expensive per seal.

No more "belated" LFR release. 99% of players won't feel compelled to run it to maximize their gear.

No more removing default tier and trinkets from LFR. 99% of players won't care about trying to snag those.

That's just off the top of my head -- I'm sure you can think of more examples of things we can change once we stop caring about that 1%.Finally, the mythic raiders have a choice and wouldn't be forced to do it, eh? You might say it was completely optional? Or maybe, just maybe, that's not actually true.